Comparing 1950 and 2040

Comparing 1950 and 2040

Gill Ringland CEO SAMI consulting
Gordon A Ringland

Introduction

Introduction

It is often said that the pace of change is increasing: this note accepts this hypothesis and looks first at 1950 – 60 years ago – in order to scope the potential change by 2040.

In describing both 1950 and 2040 we use the Ethnographic Futures Framework, which takes a culturally neutral set of headings to organize a description of people and their environment. The five main headings are:

Define – the social values, culture, economic systems, politics and public policy which shape the world around us.

Relate – the social and organizational structures which link people, influenced by demographics, lifestyles, work and the economy, habitat and ecosystems, business models, government, crime and education.

Connect – the technologies used to connect people, places and things including information technology, the media, visual arts, language and the use of space e.g. the natural environment

Create – how goods and services are produced, including innovation, engineering, manufacturing, energy generation, life sciences, material sciences, nanotechnology

Consume – how we acquire and use goods and services, such as consumer goods, energy, food and agriculture, house and home, entertainment and leisure, healthcare, natural resources, environment.

These headings allow the formulation of a coherent set of scenarios which can be compared factor by factor as well as describing different worlds in a holistic fashion. The use of separate factors is important for teasing out and understanding the levers which can be used to change people’s attitude and behaviour.

Before starting a more detailed view of either 1950 or 2040, we needed to define the geography considered: based on the Table below, and views of cultural fault lines, we took the headings of: India, Pakistan/Afghanistan/Bangladesh, China, Japan/Korea, SE Asia, Latin America (Brazil/Argentina), US/Mexico, Europe, and for 1950, UK separately, Africa, and the Middle East.

What the Table below emphasises is:

• That the stark difference between countires/regions where populations are expected to  stay level or decrease between now and 2040, and those where populations are expected to increase by factors by 30% or more.
• That 60% of the world’s populations anticipated by 2040 in “Asia”, even though slow or no growth is expected in China/Japan/Korea.

* Middle East: Iran + Egypt + others estd
* SE Asia = Indonesia + Philippines + Vietnam +Thailand

The world as it was in 1950

Globally, in 1950 the world was emerging from the damage from and living with the aftermath of World War II. Family focus was important.

1950 - Define: values

1950 - Relate: organizational structure

1950 - Connect: how people communicate

1950 - Create:  how goods and services are produced

1950 - Consume: how people acquire and use goods and services

The world as it may be in 2040

Taking into account projections above on populations and demographics,  two types of region/country: those with young & growing population, those with ageing and static/declining population.

Assumptions:

• Most regions/countries have nuclear weapons, we will have had a nuclear war by 2040
• Pervasive ICT leads to increasingly similar styles of government globally
• UK no longer differentiated from Europe
• Brazil has replaced Argentina as lead in Latin America.

We began this scenario process by "thinking aloud" about 2040,doing so by means of what we called "snippets". These are short paragraphs that seemed to capture some aspect of the world of 2040. These can be found here. In the Tables below, these same snippets have been sorted, and they are labeled with the originating paragraph number.

2040 - Define: values

2040 - Relate: social and organisational structures

2040 - Connect: how people communicate

2040 - Create: how gods and services are produced

2040 - Consume: how we acquire goods and services